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The Coming Community

1993

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Author:

Giorgio AgambenTranslated by Michael Hardt

In this extraordinary and original philosophical achievement, Agamben develops the concept of community and the social implications of his philosophical thought. Agamben’s exploration is, in part, a contemporary response to the work of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and, more historically, Plato, Spinoza, and medieval scholars and theorists of Judeo-Christian scriptures.

In this extraordinary and original philosophical achievement, Agamben develops the concept of community and the social implications of his philosophical thought. Agamben’s exploration is, in part, a contemporary response to the work of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and, more historically, Plato, Spinoza, and medieval scholars and theorists of Judeo-Christian scriptures.

A superb introduction to English-speaking readers of this important thinker and writer.

—

Rebecca Comay

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In this extraordinary and original philosophical achievement, Agamben develops the concept of community and the social implications of his philosophical thought. Agamben’s exploration is, in part, a contemporary response to the work of Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, and, more historically, Plato, Spinoza, and medieval scholars and theorists of Judeo-Christian scriptures.

Giorgio Agamben teaches philosophy at both the College International de Philosophie in Paris and the University of Macerata in Italy. He has written numerous books, two of which have been translated by the University of Minnesota Press: Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (1991) and Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1992).

Michael Hardt is the author of Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philolophy (Minnesota, 1993), the translator of Antonio Negri’s The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics (Minnesota, 1990), and the cotranslator (with Karen Pinkus) of Giorgio Agamben’s Language and Death: The Place of Negativity (Minnesota, 1991).

A superb introduction to English-speaking readers of this important thinker and writer.

—

Rebecca Comay

Giorgio Agamben, Italy’s leading philosopher and essayist, is one of the most delicate and probing writers I have encountered in recent years. His work, which belongs to the type of writing we tend to associate with Walter Benjamin, is elegant, cheerful and-to resurrect a somewhat exhausted term-utterly revolutionary.

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Avital Ronell

Agamben’s text is a rare philosophical meditation on community as a kind of linguistic belonging that moves beyond both identity and universality. Erudite and expansive, yet delivered with epigrammatic ease, this writing brings forth the most promising equivocations of meaning in Talmudic tales, Plato, Spinoza, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein to avow the contingency and communal ‘being’ within a history whose value is its irreparability. This is a moving and disruptive work that brings what is most dynamic in ontological thought to bear on what is most difficult to think about: contemporary forms of sociality.

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Judith Butler

The Coming Community tries to designate a community beyond any conception available under this name; not a community of essence, a being-together of existences; that is to say: precisely what political as well as religious identities can no longer grasp. Nothing less.

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Jean-Luc Nancy

What reviewing this text makes me want to do is offer up samples of its wisdom and clarity because they are so eloquently constructed, and because they are difficult to parapharase and rearticulate-somewhat like speaking about Vermeer’s paintings. An appreciation is what this feels like, more than a review. This book needs to be sampled for its purity and effervescence.

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SubStance

This book needs to be sampled for its purity and effervescence. There is an antic humor that I experience reading Agamben as well, and that occurs in acrobatic leaps from popular culture to writers like Aquinas. Beautifully translated by Michael Hardt, with the help of Brian Massumi, Mike Sullivan, and the author, Agamben comes through clearly in English, with an incandescence that is to be treasured, especially when it crops up in the realm of questions that point us in the direction of the very ground/lessness of our being-beings in the same spaces, yet not together.